Google calculated pi to 31.4 trillion digits and broke a world record

Pi Day, March 14, is a great excuse to seek out your favorite pie and indulge yourself in a warm, flaky crust with apple, cherry, chocolate, or whatever your favorite filling is. If you're Google, however, you celebrate March 14 by breaking a Guinness World Record with a pi calculation.

On the Google Cloud blog, Google announced that it managed to calculate pi to 31.4 trillion decimal places (31,415,926,535,897) using a y-cruncher created by Alexander J. Yee. In addition to reaching such a high calculation, this is also the first time the world record was broken using the cloud.

The previous record, set in November 2016 by Peter Trueb, was achieved using the BBP and Bellard formula. Google and Yee broke Trueb's record by nearly 9 trillion digits.

Google started its calculation on September 22, 2018 and ended it on January 21, 2019. Over the 121.1 days, Google used 96 vCPUs, 1.4 TB of RAM, read 9.02 PB of data, and wrote 7.95 PB.

Yeah, that's a lot of data.

You can dive into more of the nitty-gritty technical details on Google's blog post, but be warned — it's some high-level stuff.